How to Lose Belly Fat and Love Handles

Be honest, we would all love to know how to lose belly fat and love handles. I know it took me years to work out how to do it – and eventually needed for me to start learning to be a personal trainer before I got the hang of it!

The Western world is over weight, and rather than doing something about it we seem to be just getting fatter and fatter. Our jobs are static, sat in front of a computer doing nothing more energetic than clicking away at a keyboard. Our diet is awful – fatty meat cuts and fat in everything.

This additional weight effects our health, our energy and our look. No one wants to look fat but even those who put effort in can have belly fat and love handles. It is about knowing how to work out and what to eat.

So the question then becomes how does one go about losing belly fat and love handles?

There are two aspects that need consideration – diet and exercise. It is about maximising the effects of both for the minimum effort. Though I am sorry to say that you will still need to be putting a lot of effort in!

The first thing that you need to be doing to help you lose belly fat and love handles is take a look at your diet. There is no point looking to the latest fad diet, it takes a real change in eating habits to cut down your body fat to the point that you lose your belly fat and love handles.

This means looking to cut the fat from your diet to a large degree (fat is important in minimal amounts though, so don't look to cut it completely). Carbs are also something that you should look to cut down on.

It is important to note that we say cut down on the carbs, not cut them out. They are important – it is just that in the West we eat far too many carbs already – bread, potatoes, rice, chips all of it giving too many carbs if eaten in large quantities.

High protein is especially helpful if you are looking to increase the muscle mass – build up your abs etc. It is also an important energy source if you are looking to also be losing weight from an exercise regime.

There are two aspects to losing belly fat and love handles. The first is to understand, contrary to almost everything you read on the internet (which is almost always simply trying to sell you some miracle regime or drug) targeting specific areas for fat loss is next to impossible.

You can build muscles in those areas. You can tone up, but losing fat like that from one place is more difficult than people make you believe.

The trick then is to cut your body fat down as much as possible. Initially this should be done from cardio work (running, cycling etc – especially swimming) and from dieting. But once you have got your belly small enough the odds are you will reach a bit of a plateau.

You then need to look at weight lifting. This may sound odd, especially to women (but don't worry, you don't need to build massive muscles) but weightlifting has a huge part to play in losing belly fat and love handles.

Weight lifting gets the metabolism pumping in a way that even cardio work doesn't. Cardio work still matters but at this point the extra percentage points of body fat are stripped by stepping outside of your comfort zone and hitting the weights.